WEBVTT

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I try to look nice for you, and I get no credit. Ask

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not what your country can do for
you, Ask what you can do for

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your country. Mister Garbuchaw, tear
down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast

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with Rob Long and Steven Award sitting
in for Peter Robinson. I'm James Lylyx,

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and today we talked to Glenn Lowry
about his new autobiography and more so,

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let's have ourselves a podcast. If
you want to characterize it as a

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failure, I leave it to you. What I can tell you is that

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we don't control the weather. You
better believe that US Central Command Forces are

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going to do everything in their power
to make sure that this is back and

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operational as soon as possible. America
is a nation that can be defined in

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a single word. How does foot
him to put? Excuse me? Well,

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Hello, welcome. I'm James Lylyx. This is his podcast number six

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hundred and ninety four, moving inexorably
to another number seven hundred. Steven Hayward

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is sitting here for Peter. Rob
is with us as well. We're going

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to go to our guests in just
a second. But I got to say

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we're at a hard point here because
the verdict isn't in, so we don't

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know. And when the verdict does
come in, we'll be back next week,

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after which it will be chewed,
digested and will be extremely old news.

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It'll be the beef jerky as opposed
to these about to be served to

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Filly minual that it is now.
I have no idea what's going to happen

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to Andrew McCarthy says he's going to
be found guilty. The instructions to the

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jury seem to indicate that they can
find him guilty of maybe showing up one

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day and scratching his left ear lobe
and therego he goes to jail. I

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don't know, very briefly, like
twenty seconds predictions, gentlemen, which time

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may or may not bear out.
I don't know anything about any of this

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stuff, so I base it only
on Annie McCarthy and then the few smart

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lawyers I have follow on Twitter,
which looks like the jury came back with

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questions that seem to indicate they are
looking for a way to convict. Yeah,

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and Steven, you's right, Stephen, You're in Europe, where I'm

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sure the cap are a buzz with
this. Oh yes, and I'm trying

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to watch it from afar. I
mean, the first day with all the

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questions and asking for the judges instructions
to be read back. That sounds to

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me like this is going to go
a long while. And I went forrob.

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I think that in the case that
they do want to convict him,

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but they're going to have to take
their time to do it. I was

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once on a jury that for a
five week, very difficult trial for twenty

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eight felony counts, and the guy's
guilt was not in question, very strong

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case, but it was very strange, but it still took us a couple

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of days to work through all the
charges one by one and come up with

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guilty verdics on every one of them. And this one will be much harder,

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I think. So it'll be studied
for an awful long time and eventually

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scientists, I think we'll be able
to discern the likelihood of the likelihood of

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conviction based on the number of veins
popping in Robert Nero's forehead. It's a

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metric we have at looked at before, but it's one that we should well,

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you know, we'll get to that. There's a whole bunch of podcasts

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in Ricochet that are smart and legally
and Laurel Lee and all those other great

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smart stuff, so you will go
to them to get to the minute comments

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and observations about what has happened.
What we are going to do today is

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give you the long view with a
great man. And now we welcome back

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to the podcast. Glenn Lowry the
Merton P. Stultz Professor of the Social

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Sciences and Professor of Economics of Brown
University. He's the host of the Glenn

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Show podcast. You can find uh
you know, well, you know on

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a substack and that Ricoshet dot complation
might have heard something about. Glenn is

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also the author of the newly published
Late Admissions Confessions of a Black Conservative.

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Glenn, welcome back to the show. Thanks very much. James introduction.

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You say something that I'm sure raises
eyebrows and it makes people lean in wanting

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to hear more. You say,
I'm going to tell you things about myself

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that no one would want anybody to
think was true of them. Well,

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let's start. You want me to
tell you something about myself that no one

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would want anyone to think those two
of them, Yeah, I think so.

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I mean, you can leave some
for the book. But you know,

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having said that, we are curious, I mean killed a man and

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Reno, just killed a man in
Reno just to watch him die. I

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mean, that's the you know,
that's pretty well not quite. I was

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a cocaine addict and had to be
hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital for two months

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in my effort to stop using,
which was fitful and went on over the

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course of a year. I did
eventually free myself from dependency on that substance,

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but it was a real struggle.
How did that change your attitude towards

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addiction, because that's that's one of
those things that's fraught in the discourse today

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because of you know, what we've
seen on the streets, the plank of

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difficult drugs like fentanyl and the rest
of it. People describe a moral responsibility

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to them, some don't. I
mean, how it has that shifted and

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altered your your perspective on that problem
that wein Well, I do have a

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wealth of personal experience with how hard
it is to actually get clear and stay

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clean a day at a time and
all of that. This is the school

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of Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous.
It's a personal struggle. It's a question

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of self command. I don't have
a big philosophical position on the basis of

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that experience. I have sympathy for
people who struggle with this problem, but

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I'm also aware of the dangers of
enabling and the fact that actually nobody can

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do it for you. You have
to do it for yourself at the end

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of the day. But these are
nostrums or platitudes. I don't have any

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real wisdom for you on this,
James, Well, you know, glad,

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if I can jump in, I
think you're understating your achievement here.

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And I mean the literary style of
your memoir I think is really quite extraordinary

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because you not only combine some intellectual
content. There's poetry. I mean you

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go from poetry to quadratic equations in
the space of five pages. But you

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know, telling your personal story,
you know, confronting you know, failure,

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fear, redemption, doubts, professional
success. Uh oh, I mean

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there's several parts that robbed me literally
to tears. You know, you're you're

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young, with your son Alden for
example. And in fact, I'll tell

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listeners that if you if you're not
grabbed by the preface, then the page

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and the half glen about your father
in the first chapter will make people not

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be able to put the book down. Uh. And I'm reading all that

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sort of the political and philosophical and
other stuff. So I mean, you

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weave together an extraordinary narrative that has
this tremendousness. All right, there's my

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dust jacket blurb. I'll stop about
all that. Well, let me let

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me comment, Steve, let me
comment. I mean, first of all,

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about the preface, and thanks James
for mentioning it. I say,

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I'm playing a game with the reader
in that I'm the author of my own

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account. This is my life.
I'm telling you the story. I am

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telling you the story of my life. You, if you're wise as a

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reader, should be on the lookout
for me manipulating my control over the narrative

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on behalf of my own objectives.
This is a game. Theoretic insight that

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you know, if you're an economist, comes readily to mind. And therefore

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I have a problem. How do
I persuade you to trust what it is?

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And I'm telling you about myself,
and I make the observation that you

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know I'm going to tell you stuff
that is not really pretty and that's not

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all that crediting to me at one
level, but the fact that I'm willing

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to tell it to you should win
over your trust in me as a reliable

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narrator, and I can use that. I can use that confidence that you

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have. This guy, this scumbag, this miscreant, this complete failure of

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a human being, isn't the same
guy who's telling me about his failures and

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his triumphs over his failures and so
forth. And that's my effort to both

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be truthful to the narrative of my
life, but at the same time not

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to leave myself completely discredited in the
eye of the reader. And the preface

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of the book, where I make
this observation about the game, is meant

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to foreshadow for the reader the fact
that as you go forward, there's a

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lot of stuff about Glenn Lowry's life
that's not pretty, and that he's going

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to be telling you about. Well, sure, I get all that,

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but I've always known you're a great
writer. I've been reading you for years.

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But this cannot have been an easy
book to have written, and it

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what made you decide to really lay
it all out there. It was not

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an easy book to write, and
I came to the conclusion that, you

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know, I needed to come clean
some of the stuff, the discrediting stuff.

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Residency and a psychiatric hospital for drug
addiction, having to withdraw from a

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high level appointment in the government,
the federal government because of a scandal with

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a mistress and the accusation of assault, and a secret apartment, and all

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that. The abandonment of my son
Alden at birth and not really developing a

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relationship with him until he was an
adult. The failure to live up to

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what I and others thought was my
intellectual and academic promise as a young,

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tenured professor of economics at Harvard specializing
in technical economics and microeconomic theory, applied

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theory, writing models and getting published
in journals, and my embrace of another

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kind of professional life as a social
critic and public intellectual and a pundit right

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of center, to be sure,
but nevertheless not publishing in the American Economic

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Review for a decade kind of thing. What happened to me at Harvard in

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the early nineteen eight all of these
different things. I wanted to come to

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terms with these things for myself.
I mean, there's a therapeutic dimension,

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there's a kind of self knowledge dimension. One of my dear friends and colleagues

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was the late great economist Thomas Schelling, who wrote about the problem of self

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command, about the conflict of the
game between two instantiations of the same individual,

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one of whom would want not to
use cocaine and the other whom would

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spend his last dollar to get high, And how it is that one,

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as an economic specialist or game theorist, can conceptualize that kind of internal struggle.

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And I was very much intermortive that, both because I respect and admired

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Tom as an economist, but also
because I had struggled and come out the

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other side of a struggle with addiction. But self command and self knowledge,

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these are very closely related things.
It seems to me that if you're not

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willing to be honest with yourself about
what's actually going on in your life,

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what has gone on, what your
failures were, what your fears were,

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what you unrealized hopes were, What
were the temptations to which you succumbed.

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Why did you do that stupid thing
that you did that costs you so much?

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Why did you not take more care
of the nurturing of the relationship with

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your wife, or with your children. These kinds of questions. These are

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questions I had in my mind when
I began writing this book, to which

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I didn't really know the answers.
I'm not sure I know them now.

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Ah. Well, that I have
whole bunch of political questions for you,

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I'm going to put off, But
I have one last personal one that will

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be of interest to Rob who's shortly
to DeCamp to Divinity School. Part of

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your story in the middle, and
including, by the way, the wonderful

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anecdote of being chewed out by Richard
John Neuhouse, who I knew a bit

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right. But part of it is
you know the role of religious faith and

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helping to overcome addictions. But then
your admission that some lingering doubts have crept

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in. It wasn't quite clear to
me where you landed. It sounds a

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little bit like the famous quote of
the Latin Tertullian Right, who said,

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what would I don't Lord help vow
my unbelief? So say a little bit

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about that, and if you can
share with us where you've landed now.

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So in the late eighties, when
I was struggling with addiction, I came

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under the influence of and allowed myself
to be completely won over by the evangelical

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fervor of a Protestant congregation somewhat charismatic
and fundamentalist in its sensibility, led by

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two African American physicians who had in
effect abandoned their medical careers in order to

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stand up and nurture the development of
a new church in inner city Boston.

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My wife, my late wife,
Linda Linda Lowery, Linda Datcher Lowry,

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the economist whom I met in graduate
school and who passed away from breast cancer

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in twenty eleven. We were married
for twenty eight years. She and I

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became members of that congregation early in
its uh in its development, the congregations

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development, and I surrendered my life
to Jesus Christ. I accepted him as

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my savior. I became a born
again Christian. And it was a very

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sincere and profoundly sustaining transformation in my
life, and not just with respect to

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drug addiction, and it involved embrace
of the of the Christian worldview. And

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I talked in the book about how
nurturing that was, how glorious it was,

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how beautiful at many levels for me
it was, how compelling it was

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but I also talk about doubts.
I talk about whether or not I really

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did believe that a man had been
raised from the dead, and lives on

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whether I could, as a modern
person, as an intellectual, a PhD

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from MIT, a scientist, believe
in the supernatural claims, and I came

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to have doubts, and those doubts
not at me. I related in the

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book an an Incident. It was
the funeral of a dear friend who had

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died in her early forties from a
tragic viral infection of her heart that came

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out of nowhere and took her in
the blink of an eye. And of

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my feelings about how it is that
she was a member of our church and

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how it is that the congregation dealt
with her death. At that funeral,

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it was a moment for me which
crystallized some of those doubts, and I

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let those doubts get the better of
me. Now, I don't want to

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tell everything about the book, but
there was another dimension to the reasons why

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I moved away from the church,
which I talk about honestly in the book.

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But my theologic doubts were genuine,
and the sense of crisis that I

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felt, oh can I believe do
I really, really really believe that drove

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me to seek console, and Father
Richard John Newhouse, the late great theologian

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who happened to be a friend of
mine, opened his doors to me to

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give me console. And I write
about that in the book You asked me

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where am I now? And I
try to signal a little bit of my

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agnosticism. I wouldn't call myself an
atheist, but I also can't call myself

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a believer. I'm a person who, based on my personal experience, but

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also based upon my general temper and
my sense of where our civilization is,

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have great respect for the quest that
people are on to ground their understanding of

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the meaning of life and transcendent commitment. But I can't say that I unreservedly

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embrace that commitment at this stage in
my life. I'm an agnostic. If

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you've got to put a label on
it, well, Glenn as Rob,

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you just describe yourself as an agnostic
and not sure what you if you believe

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it. You sound like a perfect
candidate to be an episcopal bishop, because

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that's that's what I'm going for here, you know. I mean, I

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gotta say it's an absolutely beautiful book. And it's a beautiful book, and

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it comes out kind of at the
right time, I think, just culturally,

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I just think it's really important and
it's an important book for people to

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read. It's also sneaky political.
It is your least political, most political

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book. Is that a fair thing
to say? I can see why you

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might say that. Yeah. I
mean it's a personal story, but it's

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also kind of an intellectual journey.
Is that a fair thing? And I

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mean it fits in a lot of
categories of sort of American literature, and

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one of them is the the way
somebody grows and changes and gets ideas and

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throws ideas away and then gets new
ideas and then sort of emerges. Is

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that is it? Am I?
Is that fair? Or is that that's

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very fair? That's very fair,
Rob. I was going to call the

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book changing my mind. Yeah,
for a long time, because I thought

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the book was mainly about well,
I was a Riggan Conservative in the eighties

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and and then I kind of lost
my faith, not only my Christian faith

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but also my neo conservative slash conservative
political faith for a while. But did

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I really lose my faith or was
there another thing that was going on with

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me. This is one of the
stories that I'm working with in the book

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What maybe I just wanted back in
with the what I call the negro COGNOCENTI

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with the public intellectuals on the left
of black prominence who had ostracized me.

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And some of these people who ostracized
me were members of my own family or

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lifelong friends who I'd grown up with, you know, and calling me a

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traitor to the race and all of
that. And maybe I chafed a little

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bit at the ostracism that comes the
loneliness of the black conservative kind of thing,

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and I succumbed to that, you
know. So anyway, I interrogate

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the reasons for the shift, but
I thought the thing was about the shifting

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politics, and I moved left in
the nineties, broke with many of my

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conservative friends, reviewed some of their
books acoustically, wrote obituaries of people whom

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I knew were decent and wise and
morally grounded people. I think of James

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Q. Wilson, the late great
political scientists, whom I blasted in a

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review that I wish I could take
back now after he died. Samy died

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with blood on his hands because his
view of the incarceration and policing problem,

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and my view at that time of
the incarceration and policing problem. Whereat odds

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with one another. So I moved
around, and you could make the book

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about, you know, those kinds
of political shifts. You lose friends,

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Are you certain of your views?
Do you question your motives? You know?

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How do you process the struggle to
ground your beliefs in an intellectually respectable

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way, but also to acknowledge the
influence that social and cultural currents and pressures

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and conformity and whatnot might have on
you. I thought that's what the book

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was about. But that's not what
the book. That's not the main thing

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that the book is about. It's
another thing that I can work with,

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and I do work with in the
book. But I thought, at the

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end of the day, the book
had to be about telling myself the truth

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about my life and all it's aspects. I guess I feel like I guess

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why I said political. I don't. I guess I don't mean capital people.

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I've almost been culturally political, because
I mean, look, I'm you're

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a fancy professor at Brown University,
You're a published academic, you have been

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a public intellectual, which is a
phrase because I hate but the only way

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to describe what you've been for decades. You are not supposed to write a

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book about changing your mind because in
America, the way we are today,

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we are not allowed to do that. We're supposed to wear the jersey,

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and that's the jersey we're going to
wear and die with. How hard is

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it? I mean, I think
I know the answer to this. It's

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because I think I know you well
and I not know it probably wasn't as

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hard. But what advice would you
give to other other intellectuals that you know,

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fellow professors, authors, writers on
both sides, when they're thinking,

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hey, maybe I was wrong,
but I don't want to say it.

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I mean, don't you think that's
part of what the problem we have right

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now in the culture is that people, once they say something I'm on Twitter

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or wherever, they just dig in. Yeah. I think there are a

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lot of forces that unilitate in favor
of doing so. You accumulate a kind

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of social capital and your political identity, and there's an investment there. I

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mean, what can I say that
anything I say is going to sound self

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aggrandizing. That's okay, I had
the courage to admit that I was wrong.

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Everybody should be here as courageous as
me. It's twenty twenty four,

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you're on a book tour. Let's
do it. But I mean, I

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mean, did you ever think to
yourself, Okay, well, I mean

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here's the reason people don't do it, especially if people who are sort of

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public thinking public thinkers, is that
that, well, you were wrong about

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that, You're wrong about this now. People say that all the time.

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I mean, I know a lot
of people I know who are, like

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a remark economists who have now sort
of come to a slightly more i would

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say, industrial policy friendly position in
economics that I have not. And sometimes

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when I'm talking to them, I'm
thinking, well, wait a minute,

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am I just being rigid and doctor
naire or are they just being you know,

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squishy on hard economics. I don't
know if you know this paper.

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I think it's Candice Pendergrass, the
Chicago based Applied Economists Labor Economists A theory

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of yes men, long stories.
There's a nice it's a nice applied theory

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paper. We're economist around here,
so let me just you know. I

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mean, the idea is you're in
an organization and you're giving advice, and

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your advice is noisy. You know, you get a signal, but it's

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a noisy signal. You might be
right, you might be wrong. If

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you're really a low variance, high
information source of advice, your advice will

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be relatively stable over time. This
is base you know stuff. I mean,

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yeah, basically, the new observations
won't cause you to change your estimate

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of the unobserved parameter very much.
You'll be a stable over time. Vascillation

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indirectly reveals high noise in your signal. If your advice is shifting a lot,

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you are expost fact or revealing yourself
to be a relatively unreliable source of

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information. And so you're going to
be discounted in the organization when you try

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to give advice. And that's I
think a very nice economistic way of capturing

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the thing that you just got through
saying rob that you don't want to be

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shifting around a lot, because people
discount everything you say when they hear you

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say one thing one day and another
thing another day. And I think that's

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right. If I'm reading the book, I'm reading the story, I'm reading

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your story, and I'm falling along
with you. As you go on all

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these different little, you know,
tributaries and journeys, right, one of

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them is intellectual and ideological and political. It all makes sense to me because

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it's coming from you, and because
I think that's why I guess I'm trying

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to think that political the personal part
of this book makes the political part or

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the intellectual part so much more easily
understood and celebrated. And I just think

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that's I don't think I've ever read
a book that had quite has been quite

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this such a great example of that
of a thinking person's trip through his life

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and his thinking, and so I
just I think it's that's why I think

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it's an amazing book. And I
think I think everyone should be encouraged to

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think about what book they would write
just like this of themselves, because everybody's

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got a story already had a little
journey, and everybodys had a little trip

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through you know, politics and culture. So my next thing is, I

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think you should run webinars for money
and have people, you know, right,

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just do a writing workshop for people, because it really is sort of

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an extraordinary exercise when people go through
an ideological pull shift, and a lot

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of us did it's either for a
couple of reasons. It would seem either

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a new set of new set of
facts, new information that makes you a

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reevaluate thought before, or a change
in situation of maturation. People are more

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likely perhaps to find themselves moving towards
the center and gasp towards the right when

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they find themselves married with a house
paying property taxes all of a sudden,

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and once you start to re examine
your previous set of givens, in comes

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doubt about everything else that leaches away
the foundation until now you are seeing what

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else is on the other side.
And it's always it's exhilarating at first because

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you have a whole new set of
people to discover, a whole new set

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of people to support you and welcome
you into the fold and the rest of

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it. But then, as you've
said, you look back on what you

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believed before and say, why did
I believe that? Was I wrong?

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And you have to know where to
stop and fix yourself. Is it the

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difficulty these days? Do you think
is the difficulty in being of a mind

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about say, the Constitution or basic
facts about economics and finding that the discourse

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in which we live is constantly constantly
moving away from these ideas and pushing us

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into you or I feel like an
extremist because I'm a First Amendment absolute So

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how much of the shifting culture was
responsible for your changes in what you came

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to believe? Why? I guess
that's my question. Why did you switch

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from this set of beliefs to that? Was it? New information? Was

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a personal situation? Combination of the
two life what Yeah, I'm going to

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say a combination of the two given
the alternatives on offer. So in my

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specific case, I moved from right
to left. In the nineties, I

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became exasperated with my conservative colleagues on
the race question. I actually agreed with

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them about the bankruptcy of the civil
rights vision. You know, Thomas Soul

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being a source here, but he's
not the only one. I agreed with

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him that the discrimination mongering was really
barking up the wrong tree, and that

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the real problems had to do with
culture and structure of internal life within the

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community, various social developments that were
impeding people from taking advantage of opportunities that

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actually existed. I agreed about all
of that, but and this was a

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point in my life where I was
maybe vulnerable I had gone through my Christian

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conversion. I had gone through the
public humiliation of the revelation of my drug

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problem and the fact that I had
to withdraw from the government job because of

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the mistress that I was keeping in
a secret apartment accused me of assaulting her.

356
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All of these various scandalous things,
and I had endured them. I

357
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was vulnerable, was my guard was
down, and I was looking for succor.

358
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I was looking for comfort. I
was looking for comradeship and collegiality and

359
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things of this kind. There were
personal things that were going on, and

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I wanted back in to my community, which I defined, at least in

361
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part in racial identitarian terms, and
this was a factor that was weighing on

362
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me. But I also was annoyed, disquieted a little bit by some of

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the attitude on the race questions that
I detected amongst my conservative colleagues who were

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in I described in the book and
my reading willing to basically settle for the

365
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fact that the liberals have their heads
up their butts. They're completely wrong about

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this. All of their rhetoric and
their demagoguery and whatnot is bad for the

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country. And to help with them
and not be admit it as I had

368
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hoped they would be, as I
thought of myself as being too, notwithstanding

369
00:29:04.000 --> 00:29:10.079
the liberals error, remaining steadfast and
trying to do something about the problems of

370
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these marginal communities, and realizing that
as wrong as the Liberals were, it

371
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wasn't good enough simply to be right
about them being wrong about about the social

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00:29:19.079 --> 00:29:26.359
policy questions. We needed to keep
at it this kind of thing. You

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00:29:26.440 --> 00:29:29.319
know, Son, I was going
to ask about that very point, because

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you know, you wrote about a
lot of friends of mine and you know

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hears of ours, and I agree
with you, by the way, that

376
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they're quite wrong to abandon. By
the way, hope is a primary Christian

377
00:29:38.559 --> 00:29:41.400
virtue. So even no matter how
bad things are, you shouldn't give up

378
00:29:41.440 --> 00:29:45.759
hope that something cannon should be done. But then there's an earlier episode in

379
00:29:45.799 --> 00:29:49.680
the book, and so reverse chronological
order. You also have a passage where

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you talk about meeting in the mid
eighties and the White House with President Reagan

381
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and Jack Camp and Bob Woodson and
about you know, an agenda to do

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00:29:57.839 --> 00:30:02.200
something about south side of Chicago where
you grew up, and you know,

383
00:30:02.519 --> 00:30:06.200
the Bronx or wherever, and the
big idea then, as I recall,

384
00:30:06.359 --> 00:30:08.240
was enterprise zones, right, it
was going to be you know, low

385
00:30:08.319 --> 00:30:11.319
taxes, deregulation, and I never
mentioned I don't know that you mentioned the

386
00:30:11.400 --> 00:30:15.079
enterprise zone idea specifically, but I
don't think. Yeah, but I've been

387
00:30:15.119 --> 00:30:18.720
thinking for a while that was the
big idea, and it all sounded great,

388
00:30:19.160 --> 00:30:22.319
and then I don't think anything.
I thought it was, by the

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00:30:22.319 --> 00:30:26.720
way, the conservative version of the
Great Society's Model Cities program, and maybe

390
00:30:26.720 --> 00:30:29.759
it has the same problems. I
don't think it was ever tried, or

391
00:30:29.759 --> 00:30:32.960
if it was tried, it didn't
work. And I'm not aware of any

392
00:30:33.279 --> 00:30:37.160
evaluation studies about why it never happened
or why it didn't work if it did

393
00:30:37.200 --> 00:30:41.000
happen, And there doesn't seem to
be any successor to it, do you

394
00:30:41.039 --> 00:30:44.319
know opinion either one of those or
it seems to me that too many conservatives

395
00:30:44.359 --> 00:30:47.880
are still where you saw them and
criticize them for being in the late nineteen

396
00:30:47.920 --> 00:30:52.960
nineties. Well, that was Jack
Kemp, who's the guy I think of

397
00:30:52.039 --> 00:30:57.119
as the most prominent political proponent of
the enterprise zone idea, and it was,

398
00:30:57.880 --> 00:31:02.799
you know, a low tax enclaves
that would encourage capital to come and

399
00:31:02.839 --> 00:31:07.799
locate and generate jobs in inner cities. And I'm not a historian of this

400
00:31:08.400 --> 00:31:15.720
policy initiative. I don't know exactly
chapter and verse how intensely it was tried,

401
00:31:15.759 --> 00:31:19.039
although I know it was tried at
least in pilot versions in some places.

402
00:31:19.039 --> 00:31:22.000
And there must be papers out there
that attempt to evaluate, but I

403
00:31:22.039 --> 00:31:26.880
can't tell you what they say.
I've never heard of any either. So

404
00:31:26.240 --> 00:31:30.200
yeah, it was so controversy with
ideologically, and it was met with opposition,

405
00:31:30.240 --> 00:31:34.400
of course from the Democrats and from
the black leadership in many of the

406
00:31:34.400 --> 00:31:41.079
cities who didn't want to see conservative
market oriented ideas get a fair shot.

407
00:31:42.359 --> 00:31:48.880
So that's what I have to say
about it. I mean, not all

408
00:31:48.960 --> 00:31:55.559
conservatives threw their hands up and walked
away and said this patient is beyond saving.

409
00:31:55.920 --> 00:31:57.799
Let's move on to the next case. And Jack Kemp was one who

410
00:31:57.799 --> 00:32:01.519
did not do that. Bob Woodson
is one who to this day, God

411
00:32:01.559 --> 00:32:05.920
bless him. He's well into his
eighties now, he's been doing this his

412
00:32:05.960 --> 00:32:09.759
whole life. Enterprise zones is a
part of his general vision. This is

413
00:32:09.839 --> 00:32:15.640
Robert Woodson of neighborhood enterprise, of
people being able to grapple on the ground

414
00:32:15.759 --> 00:32:21.640
in the communities with the leadership that
they have and the resources that might be

415
00:32:21.799 --> 00:32:30.680
supplemented by external but that are also
indigenous to their social and cultural lives,

416
00:32:30.400 --> 00:32:36.519
to do some things for themselves.
This kind of idea, well, my

417
00:32:36.599 --> 00:32:40.119
last question and involves two different ways
to give Rob heartburn. Want us to

418
00:32:40.119 --> 00:32:45.960
talk about your academic work on the
cake eating problem, and then the other

419
00:32:45.960 --> 00:32:51.079
one is you discussed toward the end
that you you actually kind of like Trump

420
00:32:51.079 --> 00:32:52.960
and are fond of him and like
the way he insults the media and you

421
00:32:53.000 --> 00:32:55.640
know acknowledges his faults. I don't
want to go down the Trump rabbit hole,

422
00:32:55.680 --> 00:33:00.039
because we have plenty here. But
the specific question now is we have

423
00:33:00.119 --> 00:33:05.400
all the survey data showing minority voters, especially a span next, but it

424
00:33:05.400 --> 00:33:08.599
appears a considerable number of black voters
who like Trump and are moving to the

425
00:33:08.599 --> 00:33:13.000
Republicans. And this is without having
just said a moment ago that there's no

426
00:33:13.160 --> 00:33:16.000
real conservative program for the inner cities. What do you make of all that?

427
00:33:16.119 --> 00:33:21.400
Is this real? What's driving this
so quickly? On the cake eating

428
00:33:21.440 --> 00:33:27.440
problem? That was an academic paper
right about how to optimally over time use

429
00:33:27.480 --> 00:33:31.240
a resource that's limited in availability when
you're uncertain about exactly when that limit will

430
00:33:31.279 --> 00:33:37.079
be reached. Problem that exam I
can guarantee you well. As actual time,

431
00:33:37.119 --> 00:33:40.319
which was the late nineteen seventies,
people were writing down, you know,

432
00:33:40.400 --> 00:33:45.799
little intertemporal optimization models of this sort
of one kind or another. I

433
00:33:45.920 --> 00:33:49.680
was trained mit Robert Solo was my
advisor. This is the kind of work

434
00:33:49.720 --> 00:33:52.279
he did and I produced. This
paper was published in nineteen seventy eight in

435
00:33:52.319 --> 00:33:55.200
the Review of Economic Studies. And
you know, I'm proud of it.

436
00:33:55.279 --> 00:34:00.319
But you know, the practical value
of that kind of effort is is,

437
00:34:00.359 --> 00:34:07.280
I think a little questionable On the
Trump thing. I mean, what do

438
00:34:07.360 --> 00:34:12.760
I know. I'm not a political
guru. I haven't got polled dated at

439
00:34:12.800 --> 00:34:15.840
hand, and you know empirical basis
for anything I'm about to say, so

440
00:34:16.000 --> 00:34:20.679
take it with a grain of salt. I think you have to consider the

441
00:34:20.719 --> 00:34:27.800
alternative. I think the reason that
there are emanations of increased minority, Black

442
00:34:27.840 --> 00:34:35.480
and Latino support for Trump is because
people are a remembering what Trump's presidency was

443
00:34:35.519 --> 00:34:37.320
actually like for them on the economy
and other things, and it wasn't that

444
00:34:37.360 --> 00:34:42.280
bad. The pandemic messed things up, but it wasn't that bad and be

445
00:34:42.920 --> 00:34:52.440
looking at the other side and Biden's
pandering. I don't know who's advising him

446
00:34:52.480 --> 00:34:54.519
and what makes him think that this
is something that black people want to hear

447
00:34:54.559 --> 00:34:59.920
that speech at Morehouse where he says, in effect, the hooded clansmen are

448
00:35:00.039 --> 00:35:01.920
coming to get you, and I
am the only thing that stands between you

449
00:35:02.000 --> 00:35:06.840
and them. Why would you believe
in this country? Why would you believe

450
00:35:06.840 --> 00:35:09.239
in democracy? Why would you believe
in free enterprise? Why would you believe

451
00:35:09.239 --> 00:35:15.639
in the hope and the promise of
the Constitution and whatnot? When you're being

452
00:35:15.679 --> 00:35:19.519
gunned down in the street like the
hero George Floyd, or when you have

453
00:35:19.599 --> 00:35:22.199
to be ten times better than the
next guy in order to get it.

454
00:35:22.239 --> 00:35:29.159
Has he ever heard of affirmative action? You know? I think that people,

455
00:35:30.199 --> 00:35:34.199
many people, I'm one of them, who are African American, don't

456
00:35:34.199 --> 00:35:37.679
want to be talked down to like
that. The other thing I think is

457
00:35:37.719 --> 00:35:45.639
that inwards for Trump N I G. G E. R S for Trump.

458
00:35:45.719 --> 00:35:50.840
That was on a T shirt of
a rally in Atlanta some months ago

459
00:35:50.880 --> 00:35:53.880
that I couldn't help but see one
black guy running around with this T shirt

460
00:35:53.920 --> 00:36:02.000
on because Trump had been arraigned in
the Fulton County for this uh you know,

461
00:36:02.159 --> 00:36:08.119
law fair uh initiative that Democrats have
undertaken to try to keep him from

462
00:36:08.119 --> 00:36:15.719
from being duly elected again president of
the United States. I think, uh,

463
00:36:16.039 --> 00:36:24.960
there are a lot of people who
who are themselves skeptical about how the

464
00:36:25.039 --> 00:36:30.719
rules of the game can be uh
so construed as to unfairly disadvantage them,

465
00:36:30.719 --> 00:36:38.599
who uh feel some identification with with
the plight that Donald Trump has. That

466
00:36:38.599 --> 00:36:44.719
that's speaking now out of my lack
of expertise as a political commentator. I'll

467
00:36:44.719 --> 00:36:50.119
speak for myself. Reading the book, it was hard for me not to

468
00:36:50.519 --> 00:36:55.320
remember not to think of you now
because you seem like you're having a lot

469
00:36:55.320 --> 00:37:00.960
of fun. And I guess my
question is, as an academic and as

470
00:37:00.039 --> 00:37:07.559
a writer and as a professor in
a big university, is it easier?

471
00:37:09.039 --> 00:37:15.880
Is it getting easier or is it
harder to be Glenn Lowry, You understand

472
00:37:15.880 --> 00:37:17.400
what I'm asking that it feels to
me like, you know, when we

473
00:37:17.679 --> 00:37:20.400
say, oh, you know,
teacher a Brown university, we think,

474
00:37:20.400 --> 00:37:22.719
oh my god, that must be
just miserable, But it kind of looks

475
00:37:22.719 --> 00:37:29.400
like you're having fun. I'm okay. I'm okay in part because I don't

476
00:37:29.480 --> 00:37:36.280
rely on dinner party invitations from my
faculty colleagues. Here, I'm quite okay

477
00:37:36.360 --> 00:37:39.599
taking my wife out to the restaurant. I'm okay because even though this is

478
00:37:39.639 --> 00:37:45.719
Brown and Brown is a hotthouse of
ultra woke sensibility in the faculty and in

479
00:37:45.800 --> 00:37:52.199
the student body, it's not monolithically
so especially in the student body. There

480
00:37:52.239 --> 00:37:54.239
are kids here, and there are
These kids are smart, as you will,

481
00:37:54.400 --> 00:38:00.079
of course expect at a place like
Brown, and they're hungry to be

482
00:38:00.119 --> 00:38:07.840
exposed to argument, and they're tired
of being talked down to and told what

483
00:38:07.880 --> 00:38:12.039
to think. That there are a
minority, to be sure, but you

484
00:38:12.079 --> 00:38:15.559
know, we got a few thousand
undergraduates here, so ten percent is a

485
00:38:15.599 --> 00:38:19.679
pretty good number of kids. They
fill up my classrooms, they come to

486
00:38:19.679 --> 00:38:23.840
my office hours, they write me
emails. I have relationships with these kids.

487
00:38:24.719 --> 00:38:29.840
I didn't teach it last year,
but the year before last and the

488
00:38:29.920 --> 00:38:34.760
year before that, I taught a
seminar on free inquiry in the modern world,

489
00:38:34.800 --> 00:38:39.039
which I developed with the help of
an undergraduate teaching us AS at a

490
00:38:39.079 --> 00:38:45.920
brilliant young man who's now at Stanford
Law named David Sachs is his name.

491
00:38:45.159 --> 00:38:51.360
And you know, we read the
Plato and we read John Stuart Mill,

492
00:38:51.480 --> 00:38:54.920
and we read Milton, and we
read George Orwell and we read Alan Bloom

493
00:38:55.039 --> 00:38:59.960
and you know what I mean.
We read, We read a lot of

494
00:39:00.119 --> 00:39:04.239
stuff. We had twenty kids.
There was a limit that were fifty applicants

495
00:39:04.239 --> 00:39:09.239
for twenty seats in this seminar,
and it was just a scintillating experience from

496
00:39:09.360 --> 00:39:15.800
these youngsters who were hungry for,
if you will, a heterodot's take on

497
00:39:15.840 --> 00:39:21.599
some of the pressing issues of the
day. So in other words, like

498
00:39:21.679 --> 00:39:28.159
Robbie George at Princeton, I've found
a niche for myself here at Brown,

499
00:39:28.320 --> 00:39:34.800
I'm known as this particular kind of
eyeball guy. But that's attracted to some

500
00:39:35.920 --> 00:39:38.800
of the smartest kids on campus,
and that's largely what keeps me going here.

501
00:39:39.280 --> 00:39:42.360
Hunger is the word that I hope
to hear. And you said it,

502
00:39:42.760 --> 00:39:47.360
Hunger for something that is rooted,
grounded, is not just another feather

503
00:39:47.440 --> 00:39:52.519
blowing around in the winds of the
moment. And you're teaching kids who went

504
00:39:52.559 --> 00:39:58.440
through an extraordinary period in American history. They had the pandemic, the lockdowns,

505
00:39:58.800 --> 00:40:05.719
and they had the reaction to the
George Floyd death. I live fourteen

506
00:40:05.760 --> 00:40:10.760
blocks south of where George Floyd died, and my city it is still struggling

507
00:40:10.880 --> 00:40:16.039
to get back. And I am
in a largely empty office because the pandemic

508
00:40:16.079 --> 00:40:20.960
sent everybody home and everybody is content
to stay there. So these kids,

509
00:40:21.039 --> 00:40:23.360
well not kids, they are going
to be adults. How do you think

510
00:40:23.360 --> 00:40:27.960
as a as a whole if you
look at them, if you apprehend the

511
00:40:28.000 --> 00:40:31.199
totality of their zeitgeise, how are
they? How are they doing? Are

512
00:40:31.239 --> 00:40:36.280
they coming out of this stronger?
Are they coming out of this regarding America

513
00:40:36.320 --> 00:40:39.639
as actually a fragile place that can
be sundered by riots and disease? And

514
00:40:40.039 --> 00:40:45.159
is it in all the more need
of strengthening and bolstering or how would you

515
00:40:45.199 --> 00:40:50.440
say that they've weathered this extraordinary four
years? Well, again, I'm not

516
00:40:50.480 --> 00:40:53.880
an expert here. I go to
somebody like Jonathan Hid. He's got this

517
00:40:53.920 --> 00:41:00.639
book out now about middle stress on
people in that generation. He attributes to

518
00:41:00.639 --> 00:41:05.199
a lot of it to the effects
of social media. I don't know.

519
00:41:07.679 --> 00:41:13.480
My general surmise, though, is
that they're troubled and they're not doing so

520
00:41:13.599 --> 00:41:22.880
well. And I think maybe you
can see a link between that condition of

521
00:41:22.960 --> 00:41:27.119
these kids battered by the forces that
you were calling attention to, and some

522
00:41:27.199 --> 00:41:32.280
of this upheaval on campuses occasional by
protests against the war in Gaza, where

523
00:41:35.039 --> 00:41:38.559
you know, people are grasping on
to something that they hope will be meaningful.

524
00:41:39.840 --> 00:41:45.559
They're trying to find something that they
can believe in. I don't want

525
00:41:45.599 --> 00:41:50.559
to get us down into at this
late hour discussion about Gaza that I don't

526
00:41:50.559 --> 00:41:52.199
even have a point to make about
it, except that we're talking about the

527
00:41:52.280 --> 00:41:58.000
kids and what's going on with them, and I don't think one can overlook

528
00:42:00.079 --> 00:42:12.559
he's acting out or disconnected from our
general assessment of the temper of emotional life

529
00:42:13.119 --> 00:42:17.679
in youngsters at the elite institutions.
There's a lot to worry about there.

530
00:42:19.840 --> 00:42:22.719
Well, they're lucky to have you, all I can say. Late admissions

531
00:42:22.760 --> 00:42:28.800
Confessions of a Black Conservative and extraordinary
story with lots of levels and details to

532
00:42:29.679 --> 00:42:32.280
make you think and make you pause
and make you be eager for the next

533
00:42:32.280 --> 00:42:37.079
page. Lennon's been a pleasure as
ever, and we look forward to the

534
00:42:37.119 --> 00:42:40.079
next book. Whatever it is you
can go through to ideological pull shift between

535
00:42:40.079 --> 00:42:42.880
the next time we talked to you. We're just happy to read you and

536
00:42:42.920 --> 00:42:45.280
happy to talk to you. Thanks
very much, James, I'll be back,

537
00:42:45.679 --> 00:42:53.559
yes, Thanks Glenn. Thanks guys. Well, I'm sure that you

538
00:42:54.320 --> 00:42:58.599
have lots of things that you would
have liked to ask Glenn, you the

539
00:42:58.639 --> 00:43:01.360
listener, and I'm sure there's ideas
in there in the conversation and in his

540
00:43:01.360 --> 00:43:06.679
book you would like to discuss with
other like minded people. I mean,

541
00:43:06.719 --> 00:43:08.039
sure you can find somebody on the
street that doesn't know anything about it,

542
00:43:08.079 --> 00:43:13.639
and you know, the grab their
lapels and tell them the the Gospel of

543
00:43:13.639 --> 00:43:16.039
Glenn or oh, I don't know. It's too ridiculous to think that people

544
00:43:16.039 --> 00:43:21.320
could actually get together in person and
discuss these things, isn't it, Rob

545
00:43:21.679 --> 00:43:22.480
Well, I mean you can get
together in person. Of course, you

546
00:43:22.480 --> 00:43:25.400
can also join Ricochet at Rickhey dot
com and you can be part of the

547
00:43:25.440 --> 00:43:30.239
conversation there. And you can also
you know, get Glenn's podcast on our

548
00:43:30.280 --> 00:43:36.119
super Feet if you just sign up
for the super Feet. But we do,

549
00:43:36.199 --> 00:43:38.280
as you know, as members of
Ricochet, we do like to get

550
00:43:38.280 --> 00:43:43.119
together and have meetups, especially in
the summer. The summer seems to be

551
00:43:43.159 --> 00:43:45.440
the time when people want to do
it, although there's some coming up in

552
00:43:45.440 --> 00:43:49.280
the autumn too. So let me
just run down where are you if you

553
00:43:49.360 --> 00:43:52.719
join Ricochet or if you're already a
member, where you might find yourself this

554
00:43:52.840 --> 00:43:57.920
summer in Cookeville, Tennessee. It's
National Bourbon Day on June fourteenth, that's

555
00:43:57.960 --> 00:44:01.280
about two weeks away. Stop break
there. What's everybody's favorite bourbon? Steven

556
00:44:04.360 --> 00:44:13.559
le Froy, Sorry, Scotch whiskey
drinker. You're a American, Well,

557
00:44:13.559 --> 00:44:17.119
I'll tell you I have a couple
favorites. I am not a snob,

558
00:44:17.159 --> 00:44:21.239
and that I love Makers. I'll
drink Makers on the rocks pretty much.

559
00:44:21.800 --> 00:44:25.679
Makers is fantastic. Uh, the
old weller. I do like it's affordable,

560
00:44:25.719 --> 00:44:30.119
and I mean it's expensive, but
it's affordable and findable. I am

561
00:44:30.239 --> 00:44:35.079
luckily, although not in the bourbon
supply business, but only in the personal

562
00:44:35.599 --> 00:44:42.199
enhancement business. To be friends with
the family that makes the happy. Van

563
00:44:42.239 --> 00:44:45.480
Winkle ben Winkle family, Julian ben
Winkle and his wife and his son are

564
00:44:45.480 --> 00:44:50.599
old friends of mine, and it
does not they The first thing they'll tell

565
00:44:50.639 --> 00:44:52.719
you is they don't have any to
sell you or to give you. But

566
00:44:52.800 --> 00:44:58.480
it's been a fascinating. It's fascinating
friendship because you you learn a lot about

567
00:44:58.840 --> 00:45:02.840
this incredibly interesting American liquup. So
I'm I'm nash Bourbon day is a good

568
00:45:02.880 --> 00:45:07.199
day. I have a bottle of
Babby and I'm telling you that stuff and

569
00:45:07.239 --> 00:45:13.119
some diet coke. It's just it's
a fantastic drink. He wouldn't mind that.

570
00:45:14.599 --> 00:45:17.000
I'm kidding. I'm send no letters
and no letters. So there's a

571
00:45:17.039 --> 00:45:22.320
National Review cruise coming in National Review
Cruise is shipping off on June sixteen.

572
00:45:22.400 --> 00:45:27.519
So if you're on that cruise,
make yourself known to the other RICOSHETA members

573
00:45:27.559 --> 00:45:30.400
because there's gonna be a bunch of
rickshe meetups a board And I think,

574
00:45:30.480 --> 00:45:34.159
I don't know for a fact,
but if you've suddenly got this idea like

575
00:45:34.199 --> 00:45:36.039
I want to go on that cruise, I think if you go to the

576
00:45:36.320 --> 00:45:38.559
National Review website there might still be
some some statements available. I don't know

577
00:45:38.559 --> 00:45:43.000
that for facts that don't hold my
feet to the fire on that. There

578
00:45:43.039 --> 00:45:45.199
is a fourth of July weekend meet
up in Fargo, North Dakota, fourth

579
00:45:45.280 --> 00:45:50.760
July, fourth of July and Fargo, you're you're basically you're in James Lilex's

580
00:45:50.840 --> 00:45:52.599
dream journal at that point, I
know, and I would love to be

581
00:45:52.599 --> 00:45:55.760
there, except I have a show
in London. But everybody who is there,

582
00:45:55.800 --> 00:46:00.480
remember before you go home, go
to West Fargo. Fill up your

583
00:46:00.480 --> 00:46:05.559
tank at R Jay's station. R
Jay's Tsorrow. It's a gas station at

584
00:46:05.599 --> 00:46:08.079
the edge of town. That's my
dad's joint, and good gas all the

585
00:46:08.079 --> 00:46:10.440
way. Let me put that a
different way. You'll be filled up and

586
00:46:10.480 --> 00:46:15.280
ready to go. I get your
gas here. You. In fact,

587
00:46:15.280 --> 00:46:19.079
I remember, early early in your
early not in I don't know if it's

588
00:46:19.079 --> 00:46:21.199
early in your blocking days, but
certainly early in the days that you were

589
00:46:21.199 --> 00:46:23.519
writing a blog and I was reading
it. You sort of explained somebody was

590
00:46:23.519 --> 00:46:27.480
complained, said, I think somebody
said something like, well, you know,

591
00:46:27.679 --> 00:46:30.599
the gas prices go up. Those
gas station owners they just you know,

592
00:46:30.639 --> 00:46:36.400
they they make bank. And you
sort of like, very dispassionately,

593
00:46:37.199 --> 00:46:42.119
although it was clear your rage was
clear. You explained as how that business

594
00:46:42.159 --> 00:46:45.599
works, and you said, here's
what, here's here's here's what we make

595
00:46:45.639 --> 00:46:47.440
the money. You go into the
little store and you buy us, you

596
00:46:47.480 --> 00:46:51.400
buy a die cope. That's how
you make the money. Uh, And

597
00:46:51.880 --> 00:46:57.079
so stop acting like we're Rockefeller,
which I loved. Okay, back on

598
00:46:57.400 --> 00:46:59.800
we get of July twenty six.
So if you need a little more extra

599
00:46:59.840 --> 00:47:05.639
time to sort of plan the German
Fest meet up in Milwaukee, which if

600
00:47:05.840 --> 00:47:07.480
I could, I could. I
can't think of another. I can only

601
00:47:07.480 --> 00:47:10.039
think of one, maybe one better
place to have a German Fest, and

602
00:47:10.039 --> 00:47:14.920
that's Louisville. And if the summer
doesn't work for you, you can mark

603
00:47:14.960 --> 00:47:17.000
your calendar for the weekend of October
third. There's a meet up in Saint

604
00:47:17.079 --> 00:47:20.239
Louis, which is gonna be great. Saint Lois is a great city.

605
00:47:22.719 --> 00:47:24.159
And if none of those dates work, I mean, we're giving you a

606
00:47:24.239 --> 00:47:30.039
bibe. None of those dates work. Here's what you do. Join Ricochet,

607
00:47:30.119 --> 00:47:30.920
put up a post, say hey, how about a meeting? How

608
00:47:30.920 --> 00:47:35.800
about a meet up here at this
time? And guess what people are gonna

609
00:47:35.920 --> 00:47:40.440
show up because Ricochet members show up, as they do, so yes,

610
00:47:40.679 --> 00:47:43.920
do that, put it on a
calendar, show up, or you know,

611
00:47:44.280 --> 00:47:46.239
just join Ricochet and announce that you'd
like people to come to your place,

612
00:47:46.280 --> 00:47:50.920
and Ricochet members will suddenly appear,
as if by spontaneous generation. They

613
00:47:50.920 --> 00:47:54.440
will just emerge from the from the
miasma and be fully formed as human beings

614
00:47:54.519 --> 00:47:58.519
and wonderful boon companions and the rest
of it. Before we go, we

615
00:47:58.559 --> 00:48:05.199
should probably know something the war in
Gaza that Glenn referred to, the United

616
00:48:05.239 --> 00:48:10.239
States has made its efforts to solve
the humanitarian crisis caused by AMAS doing what

617
00:48:10.280 --> 00:48:17.239
they did in Israel then responding by
building a peer, and the peer ain't

618
00:48:17.440 --> 00:48:23.000
The peer was breaking into pieces and
falling apart and just didn't do very well.

619
00:48:23.039 --> 00:48:28.880
And I thought, is there an
analog to this somehow in previous day?

620
00:48:28.880 --> 00:48:30.239
And I thought, you know what
it made me think of? It

621
00:48:30.239 --> 00:48:32.760
made me think of the Jimmy Carter
failed ready to get the hostages back,

622
00:48:34.039 --> 00:48:37.239
you know, the helicopters crashing in
the desert, the just sort of basic

623
00:48:37.280 --> 00:48:42.400
technical know how that we assumed the
government, the army had, the armed

624
00:48:42.400 --> 00:48:45.960
forces have, and then finding out
that all of a sudden there seems to

625
00:48:45.000 --> 00:48:49.719
be some institutional rot that left us
vulnerable and unable to do the things we

626
00:48:49.840 --> 00:48:53.239
used to do. I mean,
I can't blame Joe Biden for this unless

627
00:48:53.239 --> 00:49:00.639
he personally approved that the schematics and
made changes. But then again, it

628
00:49:00.679 --> 00:49:04.599
is of a peace, isn't it. Well, I would just need to

629
00:49:04.639 --> 00:49:07.199
be theolytical matter. I think that's
exactly the that that should be. The

630
00:49:07.239 --> 00:49:13.159
fear that is running ice cold through
everyone in the White House right now,

631
00:49:13.519 --> 00:49:16.880
is that what you look what,
especially in a campaign year, it's not

632
00:49:17.000 --> 00:49:21.840
so much about who signed off on
the pier and whether the way, that's

633
00:49:22.000 --> 00:49:24.920
not the issue. The issue is
it symbolizes, it crystallizes a kind of

634
00:49:24.960 --> 00:49:32.559
American impotence and incompetence, whether that's
fair or not. That's that's the key

635
00:49:32.559 --> 00:49:37.199
word, rob is the competence.
By the way, I'm convinced that this

636
00:49:37.280 --> 00:49:39.480
is just like the Afghanistan bug out. I'm convinced that some people in the

637
00:49:39.480 --> 00:49:44.119
military surely told the White House this
is a bad idea, here's all the

638
00:49:44.159 --> 00:49:45.280
problems with it, and they said, we don't care, we want to

639
00:49:45.280 --> 00:49:50.239
do it. And there does seem
to be a race on now between whether

640
00:49:50.320 --> 00:49:53.800
the government is largely more incompetent than
it is the seafold that they don't tell

641
00:49:53.840 --> 00:49:58.880
us the truth about they li to
us right you know. I'm over here

642
00:49:58.880 --> 00:50:01.920
in Europe where I was reminded once
again that when the European Commission wants to

643
00:50:01.920 --> 00:50:07.559
do a new power grab, they
announced that today we're announcing two new competencies.

644
00:50:07.880 --> 00:50:13.480
That's the word to use, competencies
for fisheries regulation or sausage wrapping.

645
00:50:13.960 --> 00:50:15.719
I think they're good at it.
And you know, sparking to a bunch

646
00:50:15.760 --> 00:50:20.239
of European friends that you know,
if our government ever came out one day

647
00:50:20.280 --> 00:50:22.440
and said we're announcing a new competency, three quarters of the country would burst

648
00:50:22.440 --> 00:50:25.960
out laughing. But that's where we
are today. And I mean, you

649
00:50:25.960 --> 00:50:30.360
can look. I'll just give you
one other example, well two. One

650
00:50:30.480 --> 00:50:36.559
is the Biden Energy Program has promised
us thousands of electric charging stations coast to

651
00:50:36.599 --> 00:50:39.280
coast, and I think they've built
seven seven seven. I think that's the

652
00:50:39.360 --> 00:50:43.880
number, less than a dozen.
And then second, going back to your

653
00:50:43.920 --> 00:50:47.400
discussion a moment ago, James on
gasoline prices in Fargo or anywhere. California

654
00:50:47.440 --> 00:50:52.039
has announced a new solution to its
high gas prices. And you'll never guess

655
00:50:52.119 --> 00:50:57.760
what comes next. Tact rolls really
control price control on refiners. They're going

656
00:50:57.800 --> 00:51:01.039
to they're going to regulate them the
refinery refiners' margins. And boy isn't that

657
00:51:01.079 --> 00:51:05.119
going to work great? There's only
two in California, right, I mean,

658
00:51:05.119 --> 00:51:07.840
that's part part of part of the
problem is that California has a special

659
00:51:07.920 --> 00:51:10.039
gas brew right, Yeah, and
they only make it in two places.

660
00:51:10.079 --> 00:51:14.800
So this can you mention that.
I mean, it's very easy to regulate.

661
00:51:14.840 --> 00:51:17.559
You only have to just got to
set up to My guess is eventually

662
00:51:17.679 --> 00:51:22.039
Gaven news And is going to say
that the state of California should refine its

663
00:51:22.039 --> 00:51:23.719
own gas, which is going to
mean the gas no longer has a price

664
00:51:23.760 --> 00:51:29.480
control. It's twenty seven thousand dollars
a gallon. Yeah, but I think

665
00:51:29.519 --> 00:51:31.639
that's I think that is probably I
mean, the two interesting things about the

666
00:51:31.960 --> 00:51:42.079
Armed Services are history, right,
is that after the disaster of Vietnam,

667
00:51:42.800 --> 00:51:45.119
they a lot of the critics,
like Seymour Hrsch who wrote depending on Paper

668
00:51:45.119 --> 00:51:49.920
a lot a lot of the big
critics ended up teaching classes at West Point

669
00:51:50.119 --> 00:51:52.960
and the War College. They were
brought into the system, into the organization

670
00:51:53.679 --> 00:51:57.840
to sort of help reform it,
and it reformed it, and they that

671
00:51:57.960 --> 00:52:02.039
was an organization that actually took itself
its failures very seriously. And after the

672
00:52:02.079 --> 00:52:06.440
Desert, the Desert One, I
think it was called Desert One, which

673
00:52:06.480 --> 00:52:09.400
is the Jimmy Carter failed thing in
the desert to liberate the hostages. They

674
00:52:09.440 --> 00:52:15.679
did the same thing because it's there. It got a serious job, right,

675
00:52:15.679 --> 00:52:20.719
so they got to succeed. And
then you saw really not much,

676
00:52:21.639 --> 00:52:24.599
not much after that. Whether you
agreed with these or not, you saw

677
00:52:27.000 --> 00:52:30.599
a very effective I mean the many
invasion of Grenada under Reagan, which was

678
00:52:30.639 --> 00:52:37.920
which was was useful. You saw
that Reagan's bargaining position with the Soviets went

679
00:52:37.079 --> 00:52:43.960
up because they understood that the American
armed forces were not incompetent and not disorganized.

680
00:52:45.119 --> 00:52:49.159
You saw the First Skulp, the
Desert Storm, the first Gulf War,

681
00:52:49.880 --> 00:52:52.920
which was sort of a cakewalk for
the American forces. So it is

682
00:52:53.000 --> 00:52:58.360
possible to turn the ship around you. It isn't. It isn't a foregone

683
00:52:58.400 --> 00:53:01.599
conclusion that, you know, American
might, American competence, and American strategic

684
00:53:04.239 --> 00:53:10.280
power is on the decline. It
just it just isn't working now. And

685
00:53:10.280 --> 00:53:15.079
that I think if you're an American
voter, your question is is it not

686
00:53:15.119 --> 00:53:17.079
working now because this is the way
it is. It's not working now because

687
00:53:19.199 --> 00:53:21.920
you know, the Mediterranean seas are
too rough, Or is it not working

688
00:53:21.960 --> 00:53:29.559
now because there's derelict leadership at the
top, and or misplaced priorities. Yeah,

689
00:53:29.599 --> 00:53:32.440
well then, I mean, if
you hang around Twitter and social media

690
00:53:32.440 --> 00:53:37.400
and the rest of it along enough, you will see rampant examples of the

691
00:53:37.519 --> 00:53:43.159
armed forces making us very aware of
how socially correct that they are. And

692
00:53:43.480 --> 00:53:49.639
it seems to be that they are
concerned with elements of social policy that ought

693
00:53:49.639 --> 00:53:52.079
to be utterly irrelevant to the job
at hand, which is defending the United

694
00:53:52.119 --> 00:53:55.159
States and inventing a lot of things
that go to other places and blow them

695
00:53:55.239 --> 00:54:01.440
up. But yet the push to
assure everybody that they are inclusive is the

696
00:54:01.480 --> 00:54:07.159
sort of thing that you know,
flows from having administrations of a democratic nature

697
00:54:07.159 --> 00:54:12.079
in power that if you have Donald
Trump or Ronald Reagan, they're not going

698
00:54:12.119 --> 00:54:15.880
to be particularly concerned about whether or
not the rainbow flag is flying over the

699
00:54:15.880 --> 00:54:21.719
recruitment office. And that's a whole
sort of attitudinal shift towards the military as

700
00:54:21.760 --> 00:54:24.719
a social program, as a jobs
program, as a to one that says

701
00:54:25.159 --> 00:54:29.840
it is an instrument for projecting American
power. And you have to have somebody

702
00:54:29.920 --> 00:54:35.760
that is confident about saying that as
opposed. I mean, Joe Biden can

703
00:54:35.800 --> 00:54:37.159
say what he wants to say,
the Democrats can say what they want to

704
00:54:37.159 --> 00:54:40.239
say, but we all know that
they are part of a whole multilateral,

705
00:54:40.280 --> 00:54:45.000
transnational idea that we should all work
together, and the idea of sovereignty and

706
00:54:45.079 --> 00:54:50.599
projecting individual national power is kind of
uki, you know, in this handholding

707
00:54:50.599 --> 00:54:52.599
come by a world whereas you know
that Trump, a Reagan or the rest

708
00:54:52.599 --> 00:54:54.039
of the guys are going to say, no, we're going to go to

709
00:54:54.039 --> 00:54:57.639
alone because we're the best and we
you know, we got this, we

710
00:54:57.719 --> 00:55:00.159
got this thing going here, and
we're going to keep it up. So

711
00:55:00.039 --> 00:55:07.039
the fact that these incompetencies happen under
somebody who is himself gray at the edges

712
00:55:07.079 --> 00:55:12.039
and sometimes very very gauzy at the
center does not bolster the case that the

713
00:55:12.039 --> 00:55:16.119
Democrats are for square for national security. Just doesn't. So, yeah,

714
00:55:16.159 --> 00:55:22.400
there's that. No, it doesn't. And luckily for his opponent, his

715
00:55:22.480 --> 00:55:27.519
opponent whose biggest, you know,
biggest weakness is his own mouth, is

716
00:55:27.639 --> 00:55:31.519
kind of locked away in a courtroom
and not able to remind us that he's

717
00:55:31.559 --> 00:55:35.760
probably not an answer, not a
very good answer either. Well, Stephen,

718
00:55:36.039 --> 00:55:38.199
Yeah, Stephen, you remember four
years ago when we had when World

719
00:55:38.199 --> 00:55:44.199
War three started with Iran because we
killed because he waxed Lane I mean that

720
00:55:44.199 --> 00:55:50.119
that has been their mode forever than
any assertion of America, any violent assertion

721
00:55:50.360 --> 00:55:53.119
in order to defend American interest is
the sort of thing that destabilized that that's

722
00:55:53.119 --> 00:55:57.079
going to destabilize the world. That
Donald Trump in a second term with somehow

723
00:55:57.199 --> 00:56:00.400
destabilized the world more than it's done
to itself into the last four last thing.

724
00:56:00.440 --> 00:56:05.280
Maybe if we continue on the war
in Gaza, we've seen another one

725
00:56:05.320 --> 00:56:12.280
of those stories comes out where it's
you know, appalling news Israeli jets put

726
00:56:12.679 --> 00:56:17.960
barrel bombs into a nursery and then
a week later the story is actually precision

727
00:56:19.119 --> 00:56:25.000
munitions hit a Hamas control center in
a tunnel. We have another one of

728
00:56:25.000 --> 00:56:29.599
those with the refugee camp where they
attacked I think it was a jeep.

729
00:56:29.639 --> 00:56:32.480
They had some coordinates on it and
there was secondary explosions and a lot of

730
00:56:32.480 --> 00:56:36.840
stuff cooked off and a lot of
people were killed. And is that narrative

731
00:56:36.880 --> 00:56:42.280
still holding yet or are people just
it never seems to the end, part

732
00:56:42.320 --> 00:56:46.280
of the story never seems to take
root in the ongoing narrative. Yeah,

733
00:56:46.320 --> 00:56:50.400
so I actually expoke a couple of
days ago they fairly senior member of the

734
00:56:50.480 --> 00:56:53.559
Kanesset from Israel, and yeah,
he told the story which has subsequently been

735
00:56:53.599 --> 00:57:00.960
reported that the civilian deaths were actually
the collateral of having blown up some ammunition

736
00:57:00.039 --> 00:57:04.119
that was hiding in some of the
buildings they targeted. So once again we

737
00:57:04.199 --> 00:57:07.599
see Hamas using civilians and shields.
But I think the bigger story right now

738
00:57:07.599 --> 00:57:10.800
about the Rafa business is Biden.
Everyone said, don't go in, don't

739
00:57:10.800 --> 00:57:14.800
go into Rafa. Canivade Rafa,
and I think they head in mind they

740
00:57:14.800 --> 00:57:17.400
are going to be tanks and big
urban warfare instead of It looks to me

741
00:57:17.519 --> 00:57:22.320
is that Israel has been very cleverly
enveloping the place and using special operations and

742
00:57:22.400 --> 00:57:29.039
uncovering the tunnels, and they're slowly
strangling off Hamas in Rafa in ways that

743
00:57:29.079 --> 00:57:31.239
don't look like the big cataclysmic battle. So I mean they're ringing very clever

744
00:57:31.400 --> 00:57:36.719
because they're enveloping Rafa without looking like
they're doing so. And there we go,

745
00:57:37.440 --> 00:57:42.119
well we will see. That's it
for us now. It's been fun.

746
00:57:42.599 --> 00:57:45.800
We appreciate you listening. We appreciate
Stephen sitting in for Peter and Rob.

747
00:57:45.840 --> 00:57:46.960
Of course, brother Rob, is
is he still with us here or

748
00:57:47.000 --> 00:57:52.760
is he here? We advise everybody
to go to ricochet dot com and sign

749
00:57:52.800 --> 00:57:55.719
up because the member feed is where
it's at, as they used to say

750
00:57:55.719 --> 00:58:00.360
in the sixties and seventies. And
also to go to Apple podcasts, Apple

751
00:58:00.440 --> 00:58:04.760
Music, Apple iTunes, go to
that Apple place, the Apple you know

752
00:58:04.960 --> 00:58:07.119
it is five stars, And so
the more people can discover the podcast and

753
00:58:07.159 --> 00:58:10.360
discover Ricoshe and I ensure that we're
here for years to come. We're rolling

754
00:58:10.360 --> 00:58:13.599
going to get better, We're only
going to get bigger, and uh,

755
00:58:14.039 --> 00:58:16.159
you know, we've all been with
this operation for a long time and it's

756
00:58:16.320 --> 00:58:19.639
one of the great joys in my
life and we hope one of the great

757
00:58:19.679 --> 00:58:22.599
joys of yours. If not,
it can be ricochet dot com. I'm

758
00:58:22.679 --> 00:58:27.760
James Lylyx here in Minneapolis to Stephen, to Rob elsewhere. We thank you

759
00:58:27.800 --> 00:58:30.079
guys for showing up, and thank
everybody for listening, and we'll see you

760
00:58:30.159 --> 00:58:32.760
in the comments in Ricochet four point
two next week. Glas